I am not talking about how many are printed. Instead, I am proposing that card's have rarity that limit how many of them can be in a deck. For example, you might be able to stick four commons in, but a rare card could only be in there once. This would allow some cards to be slightly higher powered, without it completely breaking the game. Thoughts?

EDIT: There could also be a limit on how many of each type can be put into a deck. Say you have the following levels of rarity:

Common

Uncommon

Rare

Legendary

There could be a limit of say, 1 Legendary, 3 Rares, 10 Uncommon, and none for Common.

I can't say how this would work in practice, but it seems like it could prevent people from stuffing the most powerful cards into a deck while allowing them to exist.

That could be cool. In ARC the card limit now is 3, except for cities where it's 1, the deck only contains 45 cards.
But we could follow your suggestion, and have a limit by a 'rarity' indication.

Building a deck would require more thinking and pre-game tryouts.
Strategies around a single card would be possible, and you'd have to take care of that single card, being able to search and fetch, and protect it against destruction, etc ...

ARC-wise something like this could work

Trivial: 16
Common : 8
Uncommon: 4
Rare : 2
Legendary: 1
Mythical: 0

Just a bit of fun using the powers of 2. Mythical could be a card that's not in the deck at all, but could be summoned by other cards out of the blue (unglued/unhinged style).

Good input, thanks,
Nico

Desttinghim wrote: am not talking about how many are printed. Instead, I am proposing that card's have rarity that limit how many of them can be in a deck. For example, you might be able to stick four commons in, but a rare card could only be in there once. This would allow some cards to be slightly higher powered, without it completely breaking the game. Thoughts?

EDIT: There could also be a limit on how many of each type can be put into a deck. Say you have the following levels of rarity:

Common
Uncommon
Rare
Legendary

There could be a limit of say, 1 Legendary, 3 Rares, 10 Uncommon, and none for Common.

I can't say how this would work in practice, but it seems like it could prevent people from stuffing the most powerful cards into a deck while allowing them to exist.

I like the idea of mythical cards. Of course, they might be a little too limiting, because you would need specific cards in order to summon them and the mythical cards themselves.

The trivial and the common levels with 16 and 8 cards allowed respectively seems a little overkill. Powers of 2 are fun, but 16 of a single card would be more than a third of the deck. Those cards would have to be exceedingly bare bones to make that balanced, I think. It's practically guaranteed that you will draw them.

Perhaps they would act like tokens in magic - cheap creatures you can use for sacrificing and stuff like that.

A 1/1 for 1 in a Undead faction deck may be a good idea. Something like rats. They aren't really good on their own, but other cards could be included in the deck that require a creature to be sacrificed. Hmm. I may need to try creating a deck.

This would allow some cards to be slightly higher powered, without it completely breaking the game. Thoughts?
/../
I can't say how this would work in practice, but it seems like it could prevent people from stuffing the most powerful cards into a deck while

My thoughts are that whatever you add or change should be there only to either achieve the goal within the scope of the game design, or to solve a problem that hinders that goal. Just that principle alone would disqualify most of everyones ideas, but on a sound ground

It seems to me that the problem you are solving with the idea is "overpowered" cards. If that is the problem, then the solution is to revise the cards so they are not overpowered.

Being overpowered in relation to other cards is, I'd suggest, inherently a design flaw that is even known from the get go since we also restrict the copies of the card to magically balance it out. And there is also the issue, I think, that you can't actually balance it out since it just adds more random luck and card fetching to the game as Nico also touched upon.

Whoever happens to fetch or draw his/her "OP cards" would be at a to huge advantage. Why? Because of skill? No, because of sheer luck, or them building a deck around the OP cards. Because the cards are OP. Yeah, there would be some deck mis-matches where the deck with OP cards will lose, but in general, a card is OP because it brings very huge advantages. It will, by definition, inherently more often lead to a win than not. What does that add to a game? What does it solve that wouldn't be solved more elegantly with some other solution?

Furthermore, say that all of the above isn't so: The fact remains that suddenly you have a game where you opened the door to balance power of cards and their impact by limiting the amount of copies (instead of, say, doing it by gold cost, pre-requisites to play them, negative abilities etc). When you start doing that you seem to believe that it actually limits their power (it doesn't - when in play, they are in play, and it's irrelevant that you had a low chance of getting them) and, more importantly, you will eventually get too many of those cards for it all to be able to make any balancing sense in unless one accepts that the randomness in the game should play a (bigger) role.

As for gaia.li the rarity won't be used for the reasons above. I don't think that what I write necessarily applies to all CCGs, but I really think it is an important topic that, depending on the gamedesign, could either add something (even if I don't see what) or open up pandoras balancing box.

snowdrop wrote:
My thoughts are that whatever you add or change should be there only to either achieve the goal within the scope of the game design, or to solve a problem that hinders that goal. Just that principle alone would disqualify most of everyones ideas, but on a sound ground

It seems to me that the problem you are solving with the idea is "overpowered" cards. If that is the problem, then the solution is to revise the cards so they are not overpowered.

Being overpowered in relation to other cards is, I'd suggest, inherently a design flaw that is even known from the get go since we also restrict the copies of the card to magically balance it out. And there is also the issue, I think, that you can't actually balance it out since it just adds more random luck and card fetching to the game as Nico also touched upon.

This is a very good point. I don't really have any counters to this argument. I still think it would be a good idea to test it out, but from a purely theoretical point of view it does exactly what you are saying: increase randomness.